


remember me when you are queen

by historymiss



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-20
Updated: 2014-10-20
Packaged: 2018-02-21 22:47:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 438
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2485043
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/historymiss/pseuds/historymiss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"You knew." Steve doesn’t look at her. Before, he’d forced himself to. It was kindness, he had thought, to look at the ghost of the woman he knew in the person lying on that bed. He’d never really considered that he might be looking at a stranger. "You knew who he was."</p>
            </blockquote>





	remember me when you are queen

It is inevitable that Steve's steps lead him back to here: to this bedside, and her hand like a shrivelled claw on his, pale and dry, cold leather, as if her life is retreating to the centre of her being.

In his other hand is the file.

"You knew." Steve doesn't look at her. Before, he'd forced himself to. It was kindness, he had thought, to look at the ghost of the woman he knew in the person lying on that bed. He'd never really considered that he might be looking at a stranger. "You knew who he was."

"Oh Steve." Her voice is a long sigh, cracked like an old recording but still the same. It cuts him just as it always did, though now he's listening for it there's a hard edge there. "What would I have said? That your best friend didn't die when you thought he did? That if you were very, very unlucky, you might meet him?"

"Yeah." Steve can feel his jaw tense, and he consciously relaxes it. "Something like that would've been good."

The file details it all: the meetings, the failed untangling of a thread that led from the Soviet Union to Britain to across the Atlantic, to the smoking ruin of a car in Malibu.

Is it still a secret, Steve wonders, if everyone but you knows it?

"He tried to kill me no less than three times." It's like she isn't talking to him at all. "Once, he came for me in Hyde Park. Placed a bullet right here." One hand taps her shoulder. "No idea who I was, of course, but God, it was like looking at a ghost."

Peggy's voice fades, becomes distant, as if memory is too great a gulf to be crossed with simple words. Steve knows the bare bones of it- from the file, from Natasha. Flashes, small ones, from Bucky. He dreams of rain, sometimes, and the rattling of trains in dark tunnels. A woman with dark hair and red lips, standing under sodium light.

"People died, you know. Good people, ones I still miss, ones who trusted me, and I could never- ." Peggy's free hand clenches on the bedspread. "Going after him was like holding water in your hands."

Her eyes fix on him, washed out, pale and lucid.

"My greatest regret is not killing him."

"You should have told me."

"Don't be so dramatic." Peggy coughs, withdraws her hand from his. "I've kept secrets my whole life, Steve. Yours isn't special. it's just the one that ended the best."

Steve stands up.

He doesn't speak. But he leaves the file.


End file.
